


The Forest

by PeppermintIndulgence



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Forests, Haunting, M/M, Murder, Spirits
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-03
Updated: 2014-11-03
Packaged: 2018-02-24 00:55:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2562149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeppermintIndulgence/pseuds/PeppermintIndulgence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel and his friends were foolish to enter the forest, an Eden sealed away from the rest of the world with a high iron fence and guarded by a hungry spirit. The place was haunted, filled with the spirits of those who had died, reliving their last moments over and over, but Cas was the only one who can hear them. And from then on, he knew he had to make the god aware and put those poor souls to rest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Forest

The forest was well protected, curls of cold iron barring it from all sides, and it was a temptation that few humans could refuse. Every once in a while, one would wander into an area where the bars were bent into an opening, or where grass and shrubbery were brown and dry from where children had dug their way under the dark poles, doing anything to avoid the spears that lined the tops of every bar. The rotting building that stood in the centre of the dark courtyard was wrapped in ivy and collapsing under the power of the trees growing through, and the old gravel driveway was overgrown with weeds and tiny shrubs, as if there was no road to begin with. There, though, the entrance to the woods was pointedly wrapped in chains and locks, a stern sign of warning hanging solemnly, the red paint letters fading away. In just the past thirty years: three deaths and twenty-six missing person reports, which gave the local law enforcement more than enough reason to tell people to stay away.

Then again, if humans didn't disregard such petty little signs, the ravenous land wouldn't've thrived nearly as well, and Gabriel made sure it was always sated. When the Brownings had attempted to build another home away from their perfectly acceptable shack of a house, destroying more of the forest than they had any right to, he'd dealt with them. Pale, thin-fingered hands had clamped over their mouths, one by one, legs straddling their chests as he coaxed clovers and moss to live on their spit-coated tongues, wrapped their wet intestines with ivy and made irises grow from their eye sockets. When his animals gathered and began to eat what remained of their flesh, it felt _right_ , a completed circle that left his beautiful forest all the healthier.

As time ticked on and they grew too curious, it went from a joyous surprise to a ritual, and he accepted the fresh bags of meat that the town allowed to blindly wander in. At the moment, it was an ever-dwindling group of six that was trampling his flowers and saplings, and Gabriel had been patient, using the forest to carefully push them apart before plucking them up as a meal for his dear family. After all, taking them all at once wouldn't be worth the trouble if even one managed to escape.

Which meant that the man stooped by Gabriel's creek had few options for help, all his friends being lured further and further away due to their own blind curiosity. "Are you lost?" he asked as he took a seat next to him, dipping his bare, dirt-coated feet into the water.

Thickets of blue were overcast by the slow blink of lashes. The body stirred with one soft twitch of fingers on leg but otherwise provided no answer-- not to Gabriel, at least. No, this man was of a despondent nature: a debauchery to socialites, a man who seemed ore apt to give his attention to the creek than towards a god.

In wisps of words, he suddenly murmured, "You've taken a lot of souls for your own to keep this place alive... Haven't you?" He knew too much, saw everything. Senses alight with the curdling cries of old bodies decayed, souls left behind in the process; fingers of cold, clammy nature pawing at his pants legs as he spoke, their touch dampening his skin but not by superficial means. The man could feel hands, but neither their effect nor their presence would be seen by any other. Just him.

Only him.

Toes dipped into the water, and a hum emanated from the god for only a split second. Strange textures shifted on his skin, as if suddenly he would burst into a flurry of plants, no creature ever having been there to begin with. "My children need new flesh to grow," he clarified. "New energy. You understand, don't you? You'd do anything to keep those you love dearly alive."

His feet shifted. Left behind were lily pads, bright green with a healthy flower growing nearby. "Humans come in, chop down trees, set fire to the bushes as a game. I give them what they deserve. They become a sacrifice to heal the damage they've done."

The man's eyes wandered up to stare back, by no means as a way of defiance or to prove strength where all was lost, but simply in resignation. Or perhaps he looked unintrigued, bored entirely.

"I told them to never come here." He looked back to the hands reaching out from the waters, the faces of vague ripples screaming for help; it was their last moments in life, repeated like a broken record. "I did. But now..." He shifted so that one foot was away from the hands of the dead and leaned his chin upon the raised knee. "Well... now."

Silent behest their time together. Quietude broken only by the creek's running water. Then, in once more a calm murmur, he breathed, "What do you do for the children you slay? Nothing, I presume."

The god opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out; the question had him angered, and calming was necessary in order to have a sane answer. "I give them their final rites. A blessing, so that their spirits may become one with the forest. They'll complete the cycle of giving and taking from the earth, and they'll live on as true beauty."

Little did he know that the truth was far closer to a nightmare than the beauty he described. Reaching out, one hand outstretched near the creek, Gabriel would ever see the hand reaching back to him in turn, nor how it eagerly laced itself with his own digits and squeezed as a voice screamed in muffled torment. Drowning must be so horrid a death to repeat.

"You're a cruel god of denial and hate," the man spoke slowly, "and the most pedantic thing about your essence is that you've already let humans win and beat you into the ugly mesh of what you used to be." He looked to Gabriel now. "You should see with your own eyes what you've done to your own forest."

A hand was laid upon the god's bare knee and, in an instant as quick as a camera's focus, he was able to see the souls dying on repeat. Bodies falling for trees and crunching as their bones broke with the impact, blood oozing into the grass. The vague winds and blurred fog of bodies as they writhed, crushed by nothing now but what had once used to be vines. People burying their heads in hands as they curled up to die of starvation or sheer panic.

Hundreds of souls, thousands even, that the god had all but forgotten over the years. Their screams were a cacophony more blinding than a sonic boom, and yet Castiel did not even blink at the sounds.

"Do you still claim your forest to be beautiful, when it's scathed by the very species you hate?"

"Set them free, then," Gabriel hissed, ripping his hand away from the human's so that he could find peace in silence again, but soon enough it was back again. "Open the gates. I'll let them move on." The iron barrier was the only thing keeping spirits and ghosts alike trapped here, after all, and if the doors were opened the suffering humans would be free. But then the god would be free as well, and he would be able to spread and leave all that suffering behind.

"I can't do that, God of the Forest." Those eyes of drab immersion, dead inside where vibrancy was vicious from the exterior, stared at Gabriel now, making the man seem to already be a walking corpse. Growing up with so much death... It takes life away from all it touches, and this man had been touched by it for years. "I refuse to let your forest flourish and repeat history on any worldly scale. Your evil and selfishness skirmishing the globe, I won't stand for it."

Before the god could grow enraged, or end his life, the man squeezed that knee and tipped his head. "I can, however, free what you've tortured and killed... as well as provide you with more."

Gabriel didn't believe what he was hearing, but still, he felt that he could spare this man, as he had others. One boy came to mind, one who had appeared after a small fire a few years back; he'd come in with potted plants, and together they'd made the roses and saplings flourish with only a few drops of blood. "Free them, then. Stop this chaos, and bring more food for my children."

The man's lips thinned in the slightest, his hand on Gabriel still causing the world around him to erupt with shrieks. But the instant his fingers slipped away, blessed silence befell Gabriel's ears and he was once more me with only the most superficial essence of his children.

Castiel, however, was forever stuck with the booms of shrilling madness.

He stroked the hand that still clung to his own in the creek's waters. "It's been clear that your forest has grown starved as people have learned to stay away from it," the man stated, slowly dragging his hand down a forearm; Gabriel would only see him caress the air and water. "If you kill my friends, humankind from the outside will not hesitate to put up more than mere gates around your environment. People will never be able to come in here even if they desperately wish to, and your forest will starve. Spare them and keep me. I will gather people for your forest."

"How do I know you're telling the truth?" he asked, eyes wandering across every tiny weed and blade of grass as he brushed his fingers over them. "You humans are frequent liars. I hear all the voices of the living within this fence. I've heard all the things they've said, all the lies they've told to each other, what they've said to me in a fickle attempt to survive."  
"You don't know," the man could only respond. Gabriel could lay witness to the way he released whatever he was holding in the water to reach back for his pants. The man shucked them up to his knees with a frown, so methodical even as he peeled away cloth to reveal his capable skin. Slowly, the man dipped his lower half into the river, sending fish and frogs scattering from fear and confusion, and, for perhaps the first time since Gabriel saw him, he emoted. Gasped. Not to the cold, either, but to something else.  
As eyes fluttered a moment before prying open once more, the man let his head loll to a shoulder, and he sighed. "But they know. They know. Set my friends free and keep me instead. I will cleanse this place as I bring in more people for your harvest.

"Or kill me now. It is your choice."

Silence filled the air. Brows came together, and the man closed his eyes, throat a heavy swallow as he seemed so subtly overwhelmed. It was a genocide on repeat within this forest, and the strange man of vexed fixation looked nearly ready to tremble into the waters and drown, himself.

"I believe you," the god finally spoke. "Bring more people to me. Let the forest flourish from power."

Then came a grunt as eyes rolled into Castiel's head, then fluttered closed, and he endured whatever pains seemed to beset his body, shuddered as he felt corpses slither their slime on him and scream directly into his ear in either rage or plea. Their skin peeled off when they tried to touch his face, their rotten remains as ghosts something he could feel as real as life itself yet no other could see.

And suddenly, he plunged under. A force yanked him down into the river and held him for a minute, maybe two.

He came back with a gasp for all, only to feel fingers dig into the side of his mouth and try to pull him back in, skin stretching without there appearing to be anything there. He only had to jerk up for decayed hands to end up tearing apart, hanging off his bottom lip like rigour mortis.

"This forest is so enraged." The words sounded shaken; he brushed off something from his mouth, but to all but him it was merely water. "Cleansing will not be easy." Yet the water seemed to settle around him now, rather frighteningly so. Even the forest seemed to still for this force, this strange man who turned around and looked up to Gabriel with an empathetic anger in his eyes earned only by the spirits he had touched so far. "But you'll have me, yes? You'll free my friends."

Gabriel stared at the man, thinking back to the times when the forest had been ravaged; his powers weak, he was forced to kill people with only a single hand and frail vines, his other arm having been burnt to a crisp before falling off.

"I'll have you," he assured. "But in the end, you must free these souls, no matter what it takes."

The man of sagged shoulders and a soggy trenchcoat, of eyes that poised death and yet were rife with life itself and hands with a pension for penance, stared at the god for too long. Unwavering, unblinking.

Then he smiled.

"Thank you."

**Author's Note:**

> someone give me a real title for this, omg.


End file.
